Word: chekhovian
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...exceedingly well written, and Waterston reaches the heights of shiftiness at precisely those moments when he most openly proclaims his emotions. But all these people are relentlessly and statically articulate, especially when they are obscuring motives from themselves and one another. The humor of their humorlessness is often Chekhovian, and the flow of Allen's camera and cutting, together with the elegance of Cinematographer Carlo Di Palma's light, grants them a certain grace and dignity. But sometimes the members of this precious circle are too glibly elucidated; other times they are backed away from silently. In September, Allen...
They could be Eugene O'Neill's soul-wizened Tyrones, or an extended Chekhovian family chatting its way toward collapse, or the Ewings under sedation. And Tarkovsky is happy to display them in their dolors, at his pace, with all the spare majesty of his style. In the morning, Alexander celebrates his birthday by planting a tree with his son -- an ordinary bucolic tableau, captured in a ravishing shot that lasts almost ten minutes. That afternoon, when the daughter playfully balances a pear on the doctor's knee, it seems a daring bit of coquetry; nothing more need be revealed...
...family after his father became a bankrupt and a drunk. Chekhov never shirked this responsibility; it became one reason not to start a family of his own. The other, more powerful rationale was his attraction to writing. In this matter, Troyat is particularly poignant, one might even say Chekhovian: "What was a woman to him, no matter how desirable, when his life was all pen and paper...
...which David Angel employs a hilarious Monty Python accent, would have seemed more consistent. Other excesses of voice and gesture occur too much at random to be enjoyable and too much to be believably off-beat. In going for the cheap laugh, Goldman unfortunately loses his otherwise perfectly Chekhovian control and his sense of comic plausibility...
...shared. Only Wild Honey, Michael Frayn's free adaptation of a play Chekhov wrote when he was still a student, strikes vital sparks, and this because Frayn treats the text as an organism that can flower with care and pruning. At 21, Chekhov was already halfway toward being "Chekhovian"; he alternated comic and pathetic moods instead of blending the two into a sonorous melancholy for the class of landed Russians who would fall before the Revolution...